Several years ago, I was working on a large, complex application. It was a bit of a legacy project: many different designers and front-end developers had come and gone, each appending a new portion to the sprawling application.

Plus: How Apple, Facebook, Google, and more tech-world heavyweights describe their design jobs. Design is a rather broad and vague term. When someone says "I'm a designer," it is not immediately clear what they actually do day to day.

Once thought of as amateurish by professional designers, free and open-source fonts have gone through something of a renaissance in just the last few years. The quality of available free fonts has increased dramatically.

Meet North, design and development standards to align and guide your project. It's a comprehensive guide contributed to the open source community to encourage, "a mobile-first, in-browser, system based approach to design and development."

Designer Paul Rand once said, “An understanding of man’s intrinsic needs, and of the necessity to search for a climate in which those needs could be realized, is fundamental to the education of the designer.

The hardest part of design is presenting work. You can’t even argue about this. I’ve seen people who did amazing work get up in front of a client and lay eggs. I’ve also seen people do alright work and work clients around their little finger.

John Zeratsky gives pointers on the importance of crafting those little bits of text in the UI design of software products. For many technology companies, design is mysterious. So when I work with startups, I try to demystify design by talking about processes and skills.

Airbnb is an online two-sided marketplace that matches people who rent out their homes (‘hosts’) with people who are looking for a place to stay (‘guests’). We use controlled experiments to learn and make decisions at every step of product development, from design to algorithms.

This is the first chapter of how I designed this site. I will share some sketches, deleted concepts and old prototypes explaining how it evolved along the way. I was about to go to Paris with my roommate.

I’m a big believer in responsive web design. It’s the only way I know to provide the best experience across the increasingly fragmented landscape of devices and capabilities that is the new normal on the web today.

When I gave this talk1 a title, I called it “A Modern Designer’s Canvas,” because originally I was going to talk about the tools and processes that I use when I’m designing. But being a good designer or developer is about so much more than knowing how to use tools.

The following principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments, the web, mobile devices, wearables, or Internet-connected smart devices. This is a huge revision. I expect I have made mistakes.

Last year the digital agency I work for, Bluecadet, started a website redesign project for The Franklin Institute—a renowned Philadelphia science museum undergoing the largest expansion in its history.

There’s a popular misconception that NASA spent millions in a failed attempt to create a space pen while the Russians just used pencils. The implication is that good design is simple in the sense that it is simplistic or obvious.

Last week I attended Google I/O for the first time and participated on a small panel about cross-platform design challenges. There was so much going on that it was a bit of sensory overload, much like walking down the Las Vegas strip for the first time.

Cohorts are groupings based on similar experience. Common vernacular for cohorts would be generations. In the Smurf Village you had three generations of Smurfs. The baby Smurfs (which for whatever reason had the only other female Smurf). Let's call them Generation Next.

Mobile is here to stay, with its own set of rules and constraints. At the same time, it’s a rapidly evolving platform, with new technologies and capabilities being added by the quarter. We can’t design for mobile like we used to do for posters and Web pages.

As an Internet marketer, conversion is our bread and butter. I can guarantee you spend a large part of your time pondering ways to optimize landing pages. Things like copy and design are the obvious features we all like to play around with.

Chances are, if you are reading this, you work in the tech industry. Chances are, you are currently, have recently, or aspire to be involved in the creation of a modern digital product. This article aims to give you a deep understanding of the role of Product Design in this process.